Invictus
by vkf173
Summary: A short one chapter piece on Jess and his past dealing with Rory and his life before and after her, some Literati undertones. There is swearing, so beware! Re-uploaded so there are minimal grammer errors!


**A/N **Hey guys! Ok this is something that just hit me out of nowhere this afternoon, and I just finished. It's a one parter about Jess with a few Literati undertones, especially at the end. I hope you enjoy, and please REVIEW. 

Summary ~ A piece on Jess and his past based on the poem 'Invictus' by William Ernest Henely

Spoilers ~ everything happened except Jess didn't go to live with his dad, him and Rory broke up during the early summer of their senior year in high school and he went back to New York, they haven't seen each other since. Jess is now a published author.

Disclaimer ~ I own nothing at all pertaining to Gilmore Girls or the poem 'Invictus' by William Ernest Henely 

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**INVICTUS**

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**A Man Broken**

I never meant to do it. 

It wasn't something planned or thought out, but more like the spark to a fire. A single ember that began to smoke and smolder within me, growing ever so slowly with the passing of the days. So slowly in fact that I didn't even realize what was happening it until it already had. 

And then it flooded me.

Flying into a blaze and immersing me in something indescribable, something wild and uplifting I had never before allowed myself to feel. A ferocious fire that overtook me and enveloped everything I thought I knew, disintegrating everything I had worked to build around myself, turning my resolution to ash, and charring my constant barricade against the unveiling of my emotions.

I was in love.

And it scared the shit out of me.

I do not fall in love.

I didn't think I was genetically structured for it. There was no affection in the atmosphere in which I grew up, and so I was not taught anything but emotional self defense. I learned at an age all to young that it was necessary to protect yourself against the scalding burn that came with love, a knowledge that planted itself like a seed deep within me and continued to grow. Finally blooming to its full and twisted potential sometime around the age of seven. 

On a day in November of that year I returned home to find my mother sprawled limply on the floor of our small Bronx apartment. 

She was unconscious and limp, blood trickling from her mouth, bruises of deep purple and blue grotesquely ornamenting her face and body. She had been raped and brutalized by the man she had been seeing, the man who she said she loved and who said he felt the same way. And when he left her there, prostrate and ruined, he robbed her of her not only her dignity, but her courage and will to live. 

But my mother had nowhere to turn. Her father and mother were dead, and she hadn't seen her brother since high school graduation, after which she had split for the city. Her friends were sparse on the horizon. The ones she did possess were few and far between, not to mention miserable, catty, elitists with nothing in mind but self promotion. And since she was left without an outlet, she found something else.

By four every day I returned from school to the dank and thick aroma of my mother's dearest friend, Jack Daniels. It got so bad that sometimes I would actually purposely get a detention so I wouldn't have to witness her completely blitzed and often passed out on the sofa, or deal with the dizzying aroma of bourbon and whisky. After she hit this lowest of lows she was never the same. 

So I would have to say that it was on that day that I had to revive my broken mother and try to be gentle as I used the sleeve of my shirt to rub the blood from her normally striking face, and then the following years of the ever-progressing maturity which I was forced into too early by the fact that I had no option for survival accept total self-reliance, that I learned that with love came pain, followed closely by hurt, and then vulnerability.

I vowed that day that I would never become vulnerable. 

I would never allow myself to be broken like she had. I would not subject myself to something so horrifying as the scene on which I had walked into. And so my eyes became as hard as my demeanor, offensive and rude; because I learned that people frown upon the abrasive, and as a defense mechanism that is what I, by choice, became.

So people stayed away from me. They all assumed that it was my life on the streets that had caused my rough and unimpressionable persona, and I let them believe it. And of course I saw and experienced things on the streets that added to my 'Don't you Dare Fuck With Me' attitude, things like knife cuts, bullet holes, and overdoses, but nothing even compared to the magnitude of the impression that that single day left on me. 

I became accustomed to my lifestyle of solitude, and after a while it became natural to leave behind a repellent impression on the people I met by way of derogatory and sarcastic remarks, so natural in fact that it became me. The shell I placed around me began to penetrate the person inside, and I _became_ bitter and cynical rather then just projected it. But that was alright with me, because it simply bolstered the wall against susceptibility.

And that was how I lived for ten years; a dark and acidic decade of hostility and bitter cold existence in the city. 

A decade of elected and savored alone. 

I didn't need people. I chose to revile the temporary 'happiness' brought with friends, because there was always some hidden agenda, and I didn't have the patience to deal with it. I had worked so hard to make myself opaque, and nothing would change that. So instead of anything lasting I just took to letting people think they were with me, women namely, and all I was there for was the momentary escape of sex. 

And when there wasn't sex there was reading.

For some inexplicable reason books became my haven, my outlet, my time to be the me that only existed somewhere buried inside, a me that was never seen outside of the small bubble that was Washington Square Park. More precisely a single bench in that park, the place where I was alone and I didn't have to present a shield, where I could lose myself in a book and pretend that I never had to return to the hell hole that had come to be my home.

That was until I did something really stupid.

I got caught.

I had been screwing around with a group of people who thought themselves to be my friends, and we decided that things had been too quiet for to long. 

It had been almost a month since we had robbed, or vandalized, or gotten high, and it was time to remind the good citizens that this neighborhood belonged to us; we the vitriolic adolescence of poverty, the descendants of crime, the children of the night. 

So we paid the drug store in the heart of our corner of the city and cracked the cash register. 

We didn't take much, just a few bucks and some beer, but the cops were on our asses before the even got out the door, and I must have been running the right way because I was one of the two out of six who were not caught. 

Now I was never actually apprehended because there is a code of silence between us that forbids snitching, but there was an article in the paper that named names and posted pictures (the other guys and one girl had not been minors, coincidentally it had been only the other escapee and myself who were under 18) and my mother recognized them as people who had been in our apartment before. She knew as soon as she read that there had been two other accomplices that had not yet been found that I was one of them. So she decided to send me away because she just 'couldn't take it anymore.'

Having nowhere else to send me, she put me on a bus to Small Town USA to go and live with my uncle.

As you can imagine I was furious. I was established in my city. I was as close to secure as I ever would be in my situation, and I was sure it would take another lifetime to recreate the respect that set me apart in the city in this new and tiny hamlet.

That was until I reached the bus station, a sturdy institution that consisted exclusively of a park bench.

And that was just the beginning.

This town would have made Franz Kafka want to stick his fingers down his throat and vomit all over the gum wrapper and cigarette butt free sidewalk.

There was the solitary market for groceries, the dance studio that quadrupled as a school of gymnastics, ballet, baton twirling and home to those cozy little town meetings where Bellevue can visit at any time and find an entire busload of people who should be inpatients, the Chat (pronounced cat, quaint, isn't it?) Club where all of you cat aficionados can find all of your tools of torture, my uncle Luke's diner which I would be working in and _living_ above, oh, and here's the piece de resistance, twelve, not thirteen because that would be tacky, but _twelve _stores devoted entirely to peddling porcelain unicorns. 

It was then that I officially understood what Elvis Costello had been singing about, I now legitimately believed that I had reached Hell.

That was until I met her.

I'm still now not completely clear on what happened that night. The first second I was beginning (as I had done with everyone else I met) my process of disaffecting her from me by mocking her vast collection of books (during which becoming hypocritical as well as detestable because my own consisted of a considerably larger number then hers) and stealing her book, and then . . . I was _returning it to her_. 

That last part happened the next night, right after I had been chewed out by Luke for stealing a gnome (I know, very stupid, but I could tell that the owner of 'Pierpont' as he is called, was very attached to that gnome, and the best way to distance yourself is to strike at the heart) and I had stormed out of the apartment in search of open air that consisted of the right number of toxins, smoke, and gas fumes to appease my New York lungs, when I saw her.

She was walking out of some other inane town store with a bag in her hand and for some reason my feet carried my body to walk beside her, and I was talking to her. _I_ was initiating _conversation with another person, __and I was being somewhat less surly about it then usual. And then my hand slipped into my pocket, and it pulled out her book, from there extending on its own and restoring Howl to her. An action that not only revealed to her that I did in fact read extensively, but that I took after the great Mark Twain and wrote notes in the margins, two facts previously veiled from the rest of the world._

So in the course of one short walk I exposed more about myself to one girl who I barely knew then I ever had to people who had known me all my life.

_What the hell was going on with me?_

I had to get out of there, I had to get out and go away before I did something stupid and exposed something more. And I was just about to, but then she called after me.

She called me 'Dodger.'

Something about the innocence and simplicity of that nick name just completely enticed me. 

Some forgotten piece of me glimmered right then, something deep within me began to glow.

And I turned around slowly to let her know that I understood her implication, and was again about to attempt escape, but then she smiled at me.

A small smile. 

Something so uncomplicated yet so true and _happy_, something so alien to me, something I had not seen in over a decade.

And it was that small expression of purity that founded the decision that quite possibly completely changed my life. Something about this girl gently coaxed me into deciding that maybe allowing _one _person so see through the blockade was all right. If it was only one person then I would be ok. I was strong, I could handle just one.

Yet in my way stood a small obstacle. 

She had a boyfriend, but in actuality I knew that wouldn't be too difficult to overcome. 

So over the next few months I made small gestures. Offers that, while to her may have seemed trivial, were complete breakthroughs in my world; fixing a toaster, buying a basket, bringing a care package, all actions made out of this minute feeling of foreign warmth inside of me with which I was both baffled and intrigued. I was careful though. I continued to shield myself, leaving just eyeholes in my mask.

And when the door between us was finally thrown open on an early November morning the warmth doubled to a state where I became fully aware of it.

I remember everything about that morning, down to the last tear streak that glinted on her face. It was nothing stunning, the sun had not yet risen and still the velvet folds of night enveloped the town that was now my home. There was no life on that bridge where we stood, entombed in this state of insecurity and instability. Nothing moved. That morning was the stillest and yet most alive procession of moments that I have ever experienced, and as we stood there together everything around us seemed to have frozen for fear that the slightest gesture would disturb the dream that was quickly transforming into reality.  

 It was there that I realized that I really liked this girl. She was completely fascinating, striking in beauty and even more so in spirit. She also proved to be even more of a literary genius then I had imagined upon our first encounter, and continually staggered me with the ease of the flow of knowledge that came from within her. But there was something even more special about this girl. There was something in her aura that just made you feel contently comfortable and safe, something so innocent and blissful that the atmosphere of a room seemed to clear in her presence, and I was spellbound. And for the first time in my life I didnt have to fight to find a reason worthy of a smile, because now they were all around me. Pointblank, she made me truly happy.

So our relationship continued to progress through the many likes and dislikes we shared. I found that she not only had my taste in novels, but also my love for music, and she continued to relentlessly battle with me over our favored songs or sonnets, searching for the deeper meaning that I found within her instead of the lyrics. And with the time the rock solid walls I had closed myself behind began to break down slowly. It was actually more like they were taken apart stone by stone.

I permitted her to remove the bricks.

I allowed someone to discover who I really was, and it was one night while we were alone in our favorite place that I realized the magnitude of what had happened. I had been sitting there with her, my leg dangling over the side of the bridge next to hers, when I laughed. I mean I truly laughed, and accompanied by that laugh was a real smile. Nothing forced or unnatural, but almost as true as the one I had seen all those months ago, and I finally noticed that I was vulnerable.

I was vulnerable.

It took a few seconds for me to swallow that word, the dryness of it sticking in my throat and constricting it even tighter as I realized it was associated with me. 

I was vulnerable.

And I was in love.

_Holy mother of shit._

_Holy mother of all that is fucking righteous SHIT._

I knew by the look I felt upon my back as I walked away without a believable explanation that she was concerned about me, but I was too scared to care. 

I felt as if on fire.

Everything inside of me burned with this new revelation of the fact that I had become completely exposed and was now both vulnerable and in love, and then the chilled fear of how broken I could become with just a few words from her mouth, I was just extraordinarily overwhelmed.

I made the decision that night that I couldn't allow this to happen. I would not, after all that I had done, become broken like my mother. There was no way in hell that I was going to fall apart. 

So with that I left.

My soul floated from my body with my emotion and my compassion as it's shell began to take control. 

I displaced myself from everything around me and just pushed her away. Slowly, but surely and purposefully created a rift, and nurtured it to grow. Out of a nauseas fear I allowed words of indifference float out.

And soon the joyful banter stopped

Followed by the cease of passion.

And the laughs.

Then finally the smiles.

And then she broke it off. 

I knew that my monotonous behavior would lead to this, and I was prepared. And by the time she finally became so frustrated by the change and ended it I was almost completely passive. Save for but a small flash of something like loss inside of me. I was completely solid, my walls rebuilt, my emotions once again locked in the dungeons of the impregnable fortress that was my life. 

After it happened I returned to New York.

I went back to my life as I had known it before it had wavered on the ledge of catastrophe.

My 'friends' welcomed me back with what in the streets would be considered open arms, and when they asked how I had enjoyed life in Hicksville I told them it was relatively boring. They asked if the 'suave babe magnet' they had once known had 'screwed anymore sexy woman,' and I truthfully told them no. Our relationship had never crossed that line; I knew that she was far to pure for me to even think about that type of intimacy because what we had was far to special. A knowledge that spoke volumes to me about how much I had allowed myself to care, and how close I had come to losing everything I had built. 

And when they asked I had found anyone remotely attractive, I just shrugged, telling them that there was nobody who interested me.

The most blatant and flat out lie that has ever passed through my lips in my entire life.

Because there had been someone attractive, but more then just that. She had been intelligent and brilliant and beautiful both inside and out and intellectually stimulating and fascinating and pure and caring, and I had loved her. 

But above it all, I had lost her.

So it was somewhere around that time that I learned the hardest lesson of my life.

It was something that came on as slowly as my feelings for her had progressed, and something that I could not deny. For it wasn't something physical that could be brushed off or blown away, but it was a leak in the gate of my emotion. Another tidal wave posed to drown me at any second with the right provocation. 

And eventually that provocation came in the form of tragedy.

It had been another normal day of self torment in the city, and I was bored stiff. The summer sun was scorching the black and silver and glass that was Manhattan, and for us in the Bronx the air was as thick as honey, the condensation caused by the sun forming on the windows of cars and houses so that everything seemed fogged. 

Yet despite the lethargy of the day I was restless. I hadn't been able to sit still for four months, ever since the day I returned to New York, and today was no exception. Whenever I got the chance to sit in the quiet the thinking would begin, and I couldn't deal with that. There was always just this weight in the pit of my stomach, an indefinable knob that brought on second guessing; I needed to get away.

So I ventured out to find the streets practically deserted, and only discovered signs of life in the shade of the alleys. 

I walked up to them and perched myself atop a dumpster alongside a guy named Jacob who I was aquainted with but didn't know much about accept that he lived with his mother as I did, and his eyes were nearly as cold as mine. 

It seemed that I had walked in on the middle of another discussion about the quiet of the neighborhood. They were again pointing out how the lack of crime was beginning to lull the people into a false sense of complacency, and it was time to liven things up just a tad. And so the target was chosen.

Irony of ironies, the same godforsaken drugstore.

And so the door was watched and the register cracked, yet this time there was the inevitable twist that always comes at the climax of any tragedy. The tiny little oriental man behind the counter had finally wizened up, and as we were breaking away in groups of two or three he grabbed a small handgun and fired reckless and erratic shots. 

And there came a howl.

For the first time in my entire life on the streets someone who I knew had been shot.

Jacob veered into an alley and made it only a few steps before he collapsed against a wall, his hands clamped against his lower right abdomen, blood visible shocking and scarlet against the white of his hand.

I followed him in a state of adrenaline pumped disbelief. Everything inside of me was buzzing, my nerves and muscles all short circuiting from the initial shock, and my heart pounding so fast I could feel it beating wildly through my thin shirt. 

As I crouched beside him he coughed and sputtered as he gasped for breath, his hands red and glistening in the hot summer sun, and my eyes widened in horror as a scene more wrenching then any one I had ever before witnessed fell upon me.

I sat in astonishment and incredulity as Jacob fought for air in front of me, his chest heaving arduously and his face sweaty and ghostly pale. I tried my hardest to function, to help him as I pressed the cloth of my own shirt into his stomach, trying in vain to stem the unwavering flow as he labored against death.

I don't remember a lot of what he said, accept that with which he left me.

As his eyes clouded over he weakly pushed my arm off of his wound and swallowed deeply before rasping and wheezing out almost inaudibly quiet words, "You know what Mariano? Look at this. I mean man, look fucking around you. Is this something to live for? Is, is this what we strive to accomplish. Tough, unflinching, street smart. Fuck this, its not worth it. None of anything has been worth it." And here he was shaken violently as he buckled in a deep, ominous cough, and I saw his tongue was deep crimson as he continued, "Don't fuck up Mariano. Get the hell away from this. Be big enough to withdraw. Realize there is something more; Do something _more_ then _this." He whispered as he drifted away._

And I went into complete shock.

Numb.

Cold.

Stricken.

Afflicted. 

I think I just walked for hours. A nineteen year old man walking the streets of the city with blood all over his shirt in the midst of the hottest day of the year. I can't even begin to imagine the looks all over the faces of those who knew me as I, Jess Mariano, trudged along with tears in my eyes and blood on my hands. 

It was in that time that the wave struck me, a shattering epiphany that completely threw my life into the gutter. I understood the truth in Jacob's final words as I simultaneously realized that what I saw in him was a younger version of me, a me pre Smallville, and pre her.

He was right. 

Everything he said. 

I lived for the hard, for the walls, for the cold, emotionless life of the streets. It sheltered me to know that nobody could define me because they could never get close enough, but that was just the fact that now disturbed me. What would Jacob's epitaph read other then his name and date of birth? I could tell that he, like me, was completely barricaded against anything definable, and there was nothing to put on that stone. Nobody knew anything about him, just as nobody knew anything about me.

I couldn't end up like that.

And the tears came when I realized that I had strived all my life to create boundaries against emotion and vulnerability, and in turn had deprived myself of life, and in my campaign to become untouchable by any hand I had pushed away my first real love.

I had thrown love out the window. And for what?

For the 'safety' of imperviousness? 

Life is not about safety.

There is no possible way to pass through a true life and not get your heart broken or become broken yourself. And if you indeed lived a full life the broken part wouldn't be so substantial, because a true life has friends who can act as superglue to fix everything through support and comfort.

I had no friends.

I had no glue.

So I was currently broken without hope of repair. 

Broken.

I had been broken, the one thing that I had worked against for all of my life, yet it had come by nothing other than my own actions.

It was all my fault, and I knew it.

I could not continue like this.

And it had taken the death of someone like me to jolt me to this realization.

It had taken death for me to learn.

And that fact spoke to me of how drastic a situation I was in, how far I was already submerged.

Yet I am a stubborn man.

I refused to drown.

I took my undying love for the literature which had always been my haven, and I turned it into my guiding light. The inspiration of novels kept me strong while I fought for the happiness I had once known by, for the second time in my life, becoming so determined and committed to my cause that nothing else mattered.

Yet this time it was not to shield, but to repair.

_" .__ . ._Jacob Dwyler, 16, was shot in a robbery yesterday afternoon in central __Bronx___. The young __New York City__ raised boy had apparently been involved in a robbery of a Duane Reade Drugstore. Witnesses say the boy was struck by a bullet that ricocheted off the wall of a building and penetrated his abdomen as he turned to run sideways in attempt to glance back at the clerk of the store_ . . ."__

That was not going to be my fate. 

So once again I uprooted myself. I moved out here to sunny California to live with my estranged father whose only quality that I definitively shared were seven DNA markers. And I began to repair myself.

At first it was difficult, trying to meet people and not judge them or fear them or allow myself to be really seen by them. But as time passed it became more and more natural, something made easier by the fact that I found my catharsis.

I began to write.

And through four long years I have written, and I have even smiled a little.

But nothing as pure as the smiles I shared with her.

And, now that I am somewhat more open with what my emotions, I can admit that I will probably never feel happiness like that which existed with her. 

She was my Nancy. 

And I loved her.

Yet I hurt her. I know how heart wrenching it must have been for her to feel for me and then just have me transform into a cold, indifferent, jackass of a person who showed her nothing but neutral placidness because he couldn't find the strength within to allow himself to live, and I know she must hate me for what I inevitably put her through.

So this is for you my Nancy, from your Dodger.

I hope you now understand.  
  
  


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She had read all of his editorials, all of his submissions to the New Yorker, and all of his short stories. And throughout each she had recognized pieces of her in his characters, and pieces of them in the relationships of those characters. 

And always after the completion of one of his stories she would find the evidence which told her that he was finally becoming what he was always meant to be, and she would cry a little as she remembered how she lost him.

But her feelings of the past could not even hold a candle to the overwhelming torrents of emotion that washed over her after completing this. 

Yet one stood out clearly as a single tear slid down her porcelain cheek and she smiled.

Joyful pride.

He had finally done it. He had finally found a way to open the floodgates and allow himself to just be. And no other writing would ever be closer to her heart.

And as Rory Gilmore turned the page past the life affirming prologue and into the first chapter she felt her heart soar with elation. He had loved her, just as she him, and now he had found a way to say it.

She sipped her coffee contentedly as she began to read his novel, and thought back to the boy she once knew. 

This boy who had forever impacted her and had completely turned her life around by giving her the courage to search for self instead of molding to expectations.

The boy who had just now finally explained to her what had happened between them, and what had caused the pain she had always seen in those deep chocolate eyes, the only emotion that he had never been able to completely hide away.

The boy who was with her always.

The boy of complexity she now understood.

The boy whose courage would place him on a pedestal inside of her forever. 

The man she would always love.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

**Invictus** by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,  
Black as the pit from pole to pole,  
I thank whatever gods may be  
For my unconquerable soul.  
  
In the fell clutch of circumstance  
I have not winced nor cried aloud.  
Under the bludgeonings of chance  
My head is bloody but unbowed.  
  
Beyond this place of wrath and tears  
Looms but the Horror of the shade,  
And yet the menace of the years  
Finds and shall find me unafraid  
  
It matters not how strait the gate,  
How charged with punishments the scroll,  
I am the master of my fate:  
I am the captain of my soul


End file.
